29.01.2017

Review at amazon: Software Product Lines in Action: The Best Industrial Practice in Product Line Engineering

Software Product Lines in Action tries to explain, why a company should move from contract-based development to its own product strategy. But this change does not only involve software engineering - you have to do organizational changes, business process changes, technology changes, ....
One nice excerpt is "Bringing comprehensive change to a software development organization isn't easy, and false starts are expensive."

The book has three divisions: "Aspects of Software product line engineering", "Experience Reports" and "Conclusions"
Part one covers the theoretical statements and is quite readable.
Part two presents 9 experience reports, which are not really helpful. Different companies are presented with their problems and their lessons learned. The best example is Nokia Mobile Phones - it is clear that their change to software product line has not worked very well. Nokias software for mobile phones was not a magic bullet...
Part three ("Conclusions") is much to short, to learn something.
Reading the 300 pages is at the beginning quite interesting, but after page 80 i did not get anything new or helpful...